there was an awful rainbow once in heaven
by Emmel1118
Summary: "You'll need someone. Tonight, you'll need someone." A glare, across the dark of the bar; a snapped reply. "Don't pretend you understand." - April, Amy and the first anniversary of Samuel's death.


_there was an awful rainbow once in heaven_

There's a word for a child who has lost their parents.

There's a word for a woman who has lost a husband, and a man who has lost a wife.

There is no word for a parent who has lost a child.

...

"You'll need someone. Tonight, you'll need someone."

A glare, across the dark of the bar; a snapped reply.

"Don't pretend you understand."

...

A year. One year. Twelve months. Four seasons. Three hundred and sixty five days.

She cradles the tumbler in her palm, enjoying the cold of the glass against her clammy skin.

She can still feel the soft gaze of sympathy on her, and it burns a flame of anger deep within.

"Just go away, Amelia."

The other woman doesn't say a word, just sips from the glass of water in front of her.

"Just _fucking_ go away."

...

Silence. It's been like this for what, an hour already? April doesn't know why she stays. She just wants to be alone. Why won't she leave her alone?

It's about eleven, when most people are leaving their glasses and heading for the door, when the silence between them is shattered.

"You'll keep this up until around two am," the near-stranger from across the bar notes. "Then it'll hit you like a ten-ton truck. And you'll cry and you'll curse and you'll ask the world why you got dealt this crappy hand when everyone else seems to be fine."

The words hang between them. She stares into her glass, at the whiskey swirling around the bottom and she throws it down in one gulp, burning her throat but not bringing herself to care.

This time, she doesn't tell her to stop.

"And you'll drink, or you'll want to drink yourself into oblivion because the pain is the worst imaginable. And you'll not have anyone because you thought you were strong, but you're not, you're just a person and a broken person at that, whose feeling so much pain because you're a mother, but when someone asks you if you have kids you have to say no and it kills you every time."

Across the bar, Amelia drinks.

"You think you're strong, but you're not, and you will need someone."

...

Silence returns after that.

She's not sure what to make of the words, weighing them up in her aching head, spinning them around and around in her mind, trying to make sense of a senseless situation.

…

Just like she was told, two am crashes into her like a tidal wave of grief and pain and utter desolation.

But looking back at her, blinking in the half-dark, sitting on her living room floor, is Amelia.

There was something about her words, a frankness, and honesty that she hasn't received from anyone else. No one else knows how to broach the subject and instead they dance around it, saying they're sorry or that they're thinking about you – useless platitudes that meaning nothing in the end.

But Amy was right.

She thought she could deal with it on her own, but she can't.

And that's how she finds herself holding the hand of a woman she barely knows but seems to understand her better than anyone at gone two am in the dark of her living crying for the child she will never see grow up.

"What sort of mother can't protect her own child?" she stutters out.

"Why me? Why my child?"

A pause.

"What sort of God lets a defenceless child die?"

Then, simply, a plea into the dark, "Why won't it stop _hurting_?"

…

It's a little later, not that she knows the time really, when she'd stopped crying but the ache in her chest is still there.

Amelia's sitting a little distance away, her knees tucked up to her chin and April's struck by just how young she looks, her eyes glazed and tired, filled with the pain that she thinks might be perfectly reflected in her own eyes.

And that's when she knows for sure.

The other woman's words confirm what her eyes betray just a few seconds later.

"My son would be three."

The sentence hangs, painfully, truthfully, between them.

"He'd be talking, playing, laughing – _living_." It's bitter and weary, the words soft yet harsh in the dark light.

"He _would_ be three, but he's not and I'd like to tell you it gets better, but it doesn't."

She slumps back against the cabinets.

"You're always going to need someone at two am on nights like these and you're not always going to have someone and that fucking hurts."

A pause, a heavy silence.

"He lived for forty three minutes. That's all. It was the best and worst moment of my life. He was so beautiful. So beautiful." She trails off for a moment, clearly lost in her memories. "And it kills me inside when people ask me if I'm a mother. What do you say to that? I've gone through the hard parts – pregnancy, giving birth, but I've got no child to hold anymore. I'm a mother, but I'm not."

"People don't like talking about it."

"No," Amelia agrees. "People don't like talking about your dead kids."

…

Morning breaks, and the sun glances in through the curtains, falling in shafts onto the floor.

When she wakes, Amelia is gone, instead a note, scrawled on a piece of paper, is hastily slipped onto the table.

Anytime, it reads, and for that April is so very glad.

…

They're standing next to each other by a nurses station the next day, almost ignoring each other but not quite.

"Thank you," she says quietly.

"It's nothing." Then after a moment, "Just what I wanted somebody to do for me."

They go there separate ways.

…

 _ **a/n The title is from Lamia by John Keats.**_


End file.
